What is this new OpenID thing I speak of?

Essentially, it is a way of identifying yourself on a number of sites without having to create an account everywhere, or enter the same information repeatedly. For example, I can now log in to this site by putting: http://jlayman.myvidoop.com into the OpenID field.  Since my OpenID provider keeps track of all of my personal details and verifies my identify, I am done.

Where can I get an OpenID?

I’m glad you asked. If you’re a part of Vox, Technorati, or a number of other sites you may already have one. However, I chose to use a standalone OpenID provider (myVidoop). The advantage of this, is that they also have a feature that allows me to store all of my passwords to other, non-OpenID sites, with relative ease. Also, myVidoop implements some really cool security features, such as an “ImageShield” which leads to increased security without a password. If you want to read more about why, you can check out Chris Shiflett’s article, because he describes it much better than I could.

I’m sorry for the geeky article, but I just spent three hours that I should have been studying for finals hacking the Wordpress plugin so that it actually works with my site.